Environmental benchmarks for agriculture? Clarifying the framework in a federal system — Australia

Abstract

Increasingly, liability for environmental damage is being allocated to those responsible for it, and the use of environmental auditing as a means of managing this process in non-agricultural industry is expanding. This paper describes a framework which clarifies the nature of the roles and responsibilities of all people making decisions which affect the environmental impact of agriculture, as a preliminary step in the development of benchmarks or standards in a federal system of government to audit progress towards the achievement of ecologically sustainable agriculture in Australia. It is argued that farmers make many decisions which have significant environmental consequences on their farm — what we have termed localized impacts. It should be possible to derive various benchmarks or standards against which the effectiveness of farmers in dealing with their localized environmental impacts may be measured and assessed. Other environmental effects associated with agriculture, whilst observable on the farm, may be traced back to decisions made by others, in local, regional, state or federal management agencies. Decisions of such agencies affect the functioning of whole ecological and hydrological systems, and are observable as widespread environmental impacts — what we have termed systemic impacts. Consequently, it should be possible to derive a series of benchmarks and standards relevant to the responsibilities of decision makers in the various spheres.